A few times a year, the Internet bestows upon us unofficial holidays of the kind that merit a couple of well-crafted memes, though never a day off work. There’s Unofficial Mean Girls Day, the anniversary of Aaron asking Cady the date, which also happens to be my birthday (“It’s October 3rd”). There’s the Perfect Date, which Miss Rhode Island told us lies on April 25. And then there’s April 30, a national day of mourning for Justin Timberlake’s ramen noodle-like 2000 hairdo as it appears in ‘NSYNC’s video for “It’s Gonna Be Me.” A day that the President of the United States’ social media team decided to join in on this year.
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Fox News and Bill O’Reilly are, at this point in modern television, low-hanging fruit. If you want to find someone who adeptly creates outrage out of nothing, look no further than O’Reilly. Despite trying to rebrand himself as a popular historian in recent years with his books about the deaths of Jesus, Lincoln, and JFK, he has always made a career out of being angry at whatever popular left-leaning folks — from President Obama to George Clooney — are doing. The guy is easily offended, at least for the sake of good TV, and in turn creates controversy to piss off the people who hate-watch him. It’s a vicious circle, indeed, and this week he’s found his typical ire in the familiar (Obama) and the unexpected (Beyoncé).
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It seems rather unprecedented, I suppose, for the President of the United States to shoot a funny Internet video with an absurdist comic. Could you imagine, perhaps, Ronald Reagan joking around with Andy Kaufman? So I expect President Barack Obama’s appearance on Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis will cause more than a few grumbles among those who make their living as talking heads for right-leading media outlets. But at this point, when the relationship between American politics and the entertainment media has become so symbiotic, is it a surprise at all?
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Comedy Bang! Bang! may very well be one of the weirdest things on television — an absurdist talk show parody with sketch elements, cheerfully hosted by Scott Aukerman and sidekick/bandleader Reggie Watts. The show has gone through numerous name changes and iterations, starting out as a live stage show, then becoming a popular podcast, and finally landing on IFC, where its 20-episode second season premieres Friday. I talked with the very busy Mr. Aukerman — who not only created and hosts the show, but co-founded the podcast network that runs it — about the evolution of the show, what’s new in Season 2, and how he helped create the web phenomenon that is Between Two Ferns.
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Looks like Funny or Die is the new Comedy Central testing ground. Earlier this month, we learned that the network was adapting Drunk Historyas a half-hour series. And now, Scott Aukerman has announced on his Comedy Bang Bang podcast that he just directed a 30-minute episode of Zach Galifianakis’ Between… Read More

1. Last night, after a whopping 122 million votes had been tallied (a new record for American Idol), 17-year-old country singer Scotty McCreery, who quite frankly reminds us of Howdy Doody, was named the winner of season 10. [via People]

2. According to TMZ, British import Cheryl Cole has been replaced… Read More